title: On minimizing assignment errors and the trade-off between false positives and negatives in parentage analysis.
abstract: Genetic parentage analyses provide a practical means with which to identify parent-offspring relationships in the wild. In Harrison et al.'s study (2013a), we compare three methods of parentage analysis and showed that the number and diversity of microsatellite loci were the most important factors defining the accuracy of assignments. Our simulations revealed that an exclusion-Bayes theorem method was more susceptible to false-positive and false-negative assignments than other methods tested. Here, we analyse and discuss the trade-off between type I and type II errors in parentage analyses. We show that controlling for false-positive assignments, without reporting type II errors, can be misleading. Our findings illustrate the need to estimate and report both the rate of false-positive and false-negative assignments in parentage analyses.
authors.affiliation: School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld, 4811, Australia; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld, 4811, Australia; Laboratoire d'Excellence 'CORAIL', USR 3278 CRIOBE CNRS-EPHE, CRIOBE, BP 1013, 98729, Moorea, French Polynesia.
authors.forename: Hugo B
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Harrison
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Saenz-Agudelo
authors.forename: Serge
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Planes
authors.forename: Geoffrey P
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: Michael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Berumen
mesh_terms: D005828:Genetics, Population / Q000379:methods*; D008957:Models, Genetic
keywords: accuracy; kinship; parentage analysis